IIT Guwahati Researchers Develop Device To Produce Electricity From Sunlight

Guwahati: The researchers of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati have devoloped hybrid perovskite-based solar or photovoltaic devices. 

This device is cost-effective, highly efficient, easy to manufacture and easy to recycle as far as producing electricity from the sunlight is concerned.

 Due to their low-cost, ease of manufacturing as roll-to-roll devices, high material availability, and easy recyclability, the emerging perovskite-based semiconducting devices are considered to be very promising.

These devices were developed to attain power conversion efficiencies beyond 21 per cent by utilizing economical solution-based photovoltaic device processing techniques at mild room temperature and realizing high ambient, thermal and optical stability.

Due to its abundant availability on the Earth's surface, the energy from the sun is considered to be the most sustainable among all the sources of renewable energy.

"The perovskite solar cells (PSCs) research has experienced tremendous attention due to their exponential growth in terms of efficiencies achieved within a decade. However, the perovskite materials are extremely unstable towards ambient (humidity and oxygen) conditions that restrict their commercialization," an IIT Guwahati release said.

The team of researchers who have achieved the results in terms of efficiency and stability of the PSCs comprised of Rabindranath Garai (Department of Chemistry), Ritesh Kant Gupta (Centre for Nanotechnology), Arvin Sain Tanwar (Department of Chemistry), and Maimur Hossain (Department of Chemistry).

All of them are working under the supervision of Professor Parameswar K. Iyer, Department of Chemistry and Centre for Nanotechnology and School for Health Science and Technology, IIT Guwahati.

This recent study of IIT-Guwahati got published in the American Chemical Society journal 'Chemistry of Materials'.

It mentioned how charged conjugated polymers have been incorporated in photovoltaic devices as a passivation molecule to achieve defect-free high-quality perovskite solar cell devices.

With excellent reproducibility, this detect-free device exhibits a high efficiency of 20.17 per cent. Such polymer-based passivation method effectively improved the long-term device stability by improving the hydrophobicity of the perovskite layer.

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